


"A piece of valiant dust."

by hawkwing_lb



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-04
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-30 00:36:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5143877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hawkwing_lb/pseuds/hawkwing_lb
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They live for each other, as they always have. They die for each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"A piece of valiant dust."

**Author's Note:**

> [@D_Libris](https://twitter.com/D_Libris) asked for fic for their birthday. So this happened.

She is the youngest of them. Valkyrie, they call her, the name her initiate mother gave her after the Green Place died. They are few, now, where once they were many: so many left, chasing the memory of a dream, or traded themselves into scavenger tribes in the hope of a future. So many died.

They are the ones who remain, too stubborn to relinquish what they were. Too proud, though the line of their mothers will end here, when the sand eats their bones.

There have been no mothers for many hundreds of days. Nor men who chose to be mothers, either. The world is grown poison-hard and bitter, and no seed takes in barren ground.

The eldest of them keeps the seeds from the world before. Her stubbornness insists they will one day grow again. Val long since stopped believing that anything but lizards and lichen will grow in the wasteland, but she holds her silence. Enough that one of them should have some faith: it does not need to be her.

Life is hunger and thirst. Life is sniping and raiding, baiting the scavengers who hunt the fringes of their territory into ambushes. Stripping the corpses -- down to the bone, because meat is meat, and barren dust gives nothing back. They hoard guzzoline and bullets, precious water from a sour seep in the shadow of a broken rock, roots dug from the handful of thorny plants that still, sometimes, sprout.

In the silence of cold desert nights, curled with her lover, breathing the scent of her hair, she has asked herself, _Why do we struggle?_ Easier to stop. Easier to die.

But the answer is they live for each other, as they always have. They die for each other. Anything less is a betrayal of the memory of their dead mothers, their lost sisters, the children who will never be.

If Val had been made for giving up, she would already be among the dead.

 

#

 

Speak of the dead. There is a shadow on the horizon. Out of it comes Mary Jobassa's daughter. Furiosa. _Furiosa._ Battered, scarred. Carrying a weight of silences and suffering like bruises behind her shuttered eyes. Two men with her, jittery, ill-at-ease. And four...

They are not children, though beside Furiosa they might well be. It is in their faces, in their stances: their hands are soft, but there is iron determination in their grip. Their skin might be unmarked, but they carry theirs scars on the inside. But their scars don't weigh them down. They are young. They believe in futures.

For the first time in thousands of days, Val beings to hope for something beyond the wasteland. Not for her: she has dried out to sand and bones and stubbornness, and in her nothing green will ever grow. But for them. For them, she can believe in a future. Can fight for it, so that they will not have to grow old and bitter among death and memories and the dry ever-hungry sand.

They aren't the children of her body. But that was the secret of the Many Mothers. That was their creed. It doesn't matter who you birth, or who you raise: every child is yours to defend.

Children belong to the future.

 

#

 

One man, one bullet.

There is a rifle in her arms and a bike between her thighs, and the body of the woman she loves pressed tight against hers in the roar of noise and dust and metal, fierce and reckless and furious. "Together?" she says to her lover, and

"Together!"

is what she hears in reply.

For Furiosa's children, the last of the Many Mothers are riding to war.

 


End file.
